Professor Carsten Gundlach

Professor of Mathematical Physics, Senior Tutor

Professor Carsten Gundlach is a Professor of Mathematical Physics within Mathematical Sciences at the University of Southampton.

Background

At the University of Southampton since 1999

Postdoc positions at University of Utah, Madrid, Albert Einstein Institute, and University of Chicago

PhD Cambridge (DAMTP) 1992

Undergraduate education (Physics) at Hamburg

Research

Responsibilities

Publications

Teaching

Contact

Research interests

My work is in classical relativity, with applications to gravitational collapse, numerical relativity, black holes and neutron stars.

My PhD work was concerned with the quantisation of cosmological perturbations, with application to structure formation in inflation.

One of my long-term interests are critical phenomena in gravitational collapse: the time evolution of initial data that are close to the threshold of black hole formation show universality, self-similarity and critical exponents, in close mathematical analogy to a second-order (or critical) phase transition in statistical mechanics.

Another long-term interest is the development of mathematical formulations and numerical methods for numerical solutions of the Einstein equations (numerical relativity). I have made a major theoretical contribution to the first successful simulation, by Pretorius in 2005, of the merger of a binary system of black holes, the key expected source for the LIGO gravitational wave observatory. More recently, my research has focussed on matter (fluids, magnetic fields, elastic solids) in strong gravitational fields, motivated by the numerical simulation of neutron stars.

I have initiated the BritGrav series of annual conferences starting in 2001, and am organising a programme at ICMS in July 2011.